Ancestry in adapting, spatially-extended populations

Abstract

Selective sweeps affect neutral genetic diversity through hitchhiking. While this effect is limited to the local genomic region of the sweep in panmictic populations, we find that in spatially-extended populations the combined effects of many unlinked sweeps can affect patterns of ancestry (and therefore neutral genetic diversity) across the whole genome. Even low rates of sweeps can be enough to skew the spatial locations of ancestors such that neutral mutations that occur in an individual living outside a small region in the center of the range have virtually no chance of fixing in the population.